Stellar Blade’s Devs Intentionally Added Input Lag After All

A month after telling players to change their monitor settings, Shift Up’s director has a surprising revelation about the input lag in Stellar Blade.

As we have already seen, Stellar Blade turned out to have some decent reviews. While Shift Up didn’t quite make a GOTY worthy title like Round 8 Studios did with Lies of P last year, they have made an above average title, with a lot of praise laid towards its combat systems and technical performance on the PlayStation 5.

In fact, Digital Foundry’s report confirmed that Shift Up accomplished hitting a rock solid 60 FPS on Performance Mode. Other graphical modes still provide a satisfying experience that doesn’t deter from the action. Digital Foundry found that part of Shift Up’s success stems from staying in their lane, and avoiding ambitious visual flourishes in bigger games, like ray tracing.

However, there is one choice that will likely surprise everyone who has been seeing, and even playing, the game so far.

As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Stellar Blade director Kim Hyung-Tae revealed in a 4Gamer interview that they added input lag when you have Eve performing certain moves, such as a dodge or a perfect parry.

This was their translation of Kim’s statement:

“In Stellar Blade, there is about a 0.5 second lag between the moment you press the button and the moment the skill is visible on-screen. It’s a time lag that can’t be reduced any further.

We made it so that the character’s movement does not get triggered immediately upon button press, as we felt this would not fit the game’s style of animation.

Thus, we made it so that the skill itself is activated the moment you press the button, but the animation of the movement follows afterwards.”

Kim also said that if they get feedback complaining about the input lag, they may change it later. Video Games Chronicle speculates that they may have made that change with the 1^st patch, but we may not really know what gamers feel until a week or so after launch, when the people who do buy it get sufficient time to figure out what they really feel about it.

It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow, when some early players of the demo complained about input lag as well. Shift Up’s official response was to check their TV settings to set to game mode, which definitely felt like they were talking down to those early players.

Some gamers, if not everyone, do understand that game development involves some smoke and mirrors. We know the caves we go out of are really just polygons and bits of data. Some of us also know, on a deeper level, that sometimes you’re forced to move in strange winding paths to leave caves, so that the game has time to load up the next level for you.

And there are gamers who are almost as smart as the devs themselves, who can figure out technical details like graphics and framerates. Game companies like ShiftUp shouldn’t be talking to their fans like they don’t know what they’re talking about. Hopefully, if they’re willing to open up about this, they can talk to us with more honesty in the future.